BOOKS ON THE FLY

Here are the choices for ways to acquire “Stargirl” by Jerry Spinelli. It’s a YA (young adult) about a nonconformist who comes to a super-conservative little “area” high school in Arizona. She dances in the rain -- there’s rain? Must be sci-fi. Anyway, you recognize this creature: the innocent but knowing young girl who wakes everyone up to the possibilities of life.

But who knew there were this many possibilities in acquiring a book? Twenty-two. Four require expensive electronic machines to access. YouTube is not listed, but no doubt if the book is a hit, it’ll get into the act.
Used, Hardcover, $9.00
Used, Hardcover, $6.95
New, Trade Paper, $9.95
New, Mass Market, $9.95
Used, Trade Paper, $6.00
Used, Trade Paper, $5.50
New, Trade Paper, $8.95
Used, Trade Paper, $6.50
Used, Trade Paper, $5.95
Used, Hardcover, $9.95
Used, Book Club Hardcover, $5.95
New, Mass Market, $12.57
New, Mass Market, $12.98
New, Compact Disc, $25.00
Used, Trade Paper, $5.00
New, Mass Market, $6.99
Microsoft Reader Ebooks, Electronic, $7.94
Adobe Digital Editions, Electronic, $7.94
Palm Reader Ebooks, Electronic, $7.94
Used, Book Club Paperback, $2.50
New, Library Bound, $21.50
New, Library, $20.50

What does this imply, not in terms of the sales of books though it clearly will mean a whole lot more bookkeeping and monitoring of agencies plus mastering more technology, but in terms of impact on the actual writing?

First, authors will need to be aware of how their words sound. Good writers already read their own work to themselves. The more the writing is shaped by listener accessibility, moving back towards ballads and poetry, the less the use of the long, intricate, subtle sentence a la Faulkner or Proust. BUT the fact that it is more restricted and maybe more rare will make it more a sign of sophistication to read what cannot really be appreciated out loud. Maybe some of that is already in place.

Stories read out out by their authors are good, but not all authors are good readers and, anyway, a trained actor can mean a major jump in effectiveness, as listeners to “Selected Shorts” know. Whether such a strategy adds enough value to a story to allow for paying the actor is a different question.

They say that Young Adult is the hot category and Sci-fi/fantasy is as well, so I’m sure there will be many coming of age in the galaxy or “zits in space” stories. I predict they’ll want sound effects. Maybe you remember reading comics out loud and adding all the “pow blam” stuff with mouth noises. But now even little kids can run a sound board. Why stop there? Why not go to video? Maybe not with actors, but with suggestive images. Will this mean a new emphasis on description and metaphor in writing? Or will there be more interest in a radio-type approach like Prairie Home Companion where the dialogue leads in and out of fantasy, enabled by sound effects?

Okay, turn the page. Most of good writing hinges on experience by the author, either real or imagined. Maybe it is the access to imagery and travel and class mobility that has made people so moralistic about what is memoir-as-remembered versus memoir-as-proven-fact, without ever questioning the value of proven fact. But it seems clear to me that the more people have had access to intense and surprising experience, the more many have avoided and denied it. It scares them. BUT they like to read about it, so it’s shaped, buffered, and ends well -- if you consider a book a good end.

One of the bits I ran across long ago and have never been able to find again was an Ed Hoagland review of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” in which he took Peter to task for going off to Tibet, leaving his children behind when his wife had just died. Yet the stunning value of the book is that it confronts the death of Deborah Love, the Buddhist poet who was Peter’s wife, which is something I suspect she would have valued. Read the book, see what I mean. But maybe it wasn’t even Hoagland. As I say, I’ve never found it again.

I’m reading “Proust and the Squid” (Maryanne Wolf) which is about reading, how the brain does it, and makes the suggestion that writing things down (like keeping a decent set of notes) makes it possible to think things impossible to think in spoken words. It’s like math, which requires blackboards of symbolism. I certainly know it’s hard to keep track of a novel or even a memoir. Holes. Repetition loops. Chronology is the least of the problems and it IS a problem if you are pursuing a developmental sequence that depends on it.

Not that there might not be a another way to go. I clustered the memoir about Bob Scriver by topics, three organized chronologically (the steps of casting a bronze, several hunting episodes in calendar order, and the sequence of wives), and the rest governed by an image suggesting incidents: miserable black molding material stood for all the things that went wrong. This was not so much like the outlining they used to teach us in school as like the “mapping” or “webbing” they teach kids now. Older readers complain they are confused.

“Proust and the Squid” suggests that what we do and learn shapes our brains, which seems unarguable at this point. Brains are spontaneously responsive, wiring and rewiring themselves, more like linked blogs or continually edited videos than the stable page.

I’ve been thinking about the industrial revolution and the remark in something I read that high schools are an invention of the industrial revolution: assembly lines, uniformity, staged development, imposed quality control, assigned departments. It seems clear to me that high schools have about reached their limits. But books have not.

No longer does the idea of “books in print” apply because much “writing” is no longer in ink-on-paper print and, anyway, maybe some of these phenomena aren’t books at all. But they don’t REPLACE books. Maybe schools will transform in a similar way, multiplying out into many forms. Maybe it’s already happened. If half the school-aged population leaves high school before graduation but still goes on learning and working, what is that? Self-teaching? Rock n’ Roll education? On the fly? What about “magnet schools” for pre-med or the arts?